Comment by izacus
2 days ago
That would make it impossible to deploy it next to other services on an existing machine... why would you want less flexibility?
2 days ago
That would make it impossible to deploy it next to other services on an existing machine... why would you want less flexibility?
When did it become impossible to run a VM next to other services on an existing machine? As they said, Home Assistant OS works great with that setup and it's rock solid in my experience.
Running a full resource hungry VM when a container is enough is downright silly.
And the HassOS you mention had to go through a lot of work from HASS team to allow for full container runtime so it gets the functionality UniFi's approach has out of the box.
I don't think running a VM (at least) for a core piece of network infrastructure is silly at all, in fact I think it would be silly not to. That is something that should never - ever - break because it would be a very bad day if it did.
The only way to approach certain stability is by removing variables and making the environment as predictable as you possibly can. Containers partially address this issue by shipping a predictable user-space environment, but that still leaves the kernel.
Other examples would include OpenMediaVault, TrueNAS, Mikrotik CHR, VyOS which are all distributed as VM appliances (or host system installs) even though technically, I'm sure all of them could be distributed as containers (and I think VyOS can be used this way, but I don't believe it's meant for production usage).
And personally I want a much thicker security boundary that VMs provide when it comes to critical services like network controllers. Of course that would require a slightly different setup to begin with, i.e. having UniFi in one VM, and having random containers in another VM which is how I prefer to run things at home (in general, I don't use UniFi products).